. ", \ \. -- \ t J . t . . '- h: ""é " "....:. In gullies alongside unpaved city streets, goats rummaged in trash and human ex- crement. The rest of the country had no electrical grid, no water or sewage sys- tem. Chad ranked fifth from the bottom in a U.N. index of human development. Three-quarters of the population of nine million were illiterate. Nearly one out of two people did not live to age forty. , : t i f( . r I -'\. - I" " , \ " f \, . """"- J .. ,. " , \ \ ""> ':\ , ... f - ., rebel armies. The rest was lost to corrup- tion, shoddy, half-built projects, and numbered bank accounts outside Chad. In September of 2008, the World Bank withdrew from the project. The events in Darfur have a direct bearing on the political instability in Chad. The Sudanese government sup- ports the Chadian rebels with bases in ',r. - ':: '- ,. :.; .; ,.. four- hour journey overland to the frontier with Sudan. In midafternoon, he arrived in Adré, a town of ten thousand inhabitants direcdy across the border with Darfur. Travelling along the border, he saw hundreds of people encamped in makeshift shelters of reeds and straw, wIth rags and tattered blankets suspended overhead on sticks. _i' \ ) j I . \ \ j , .. - ,. \ \ \ ., , i ... '. '1 ('( ,.r , " '\. it , of ft Relief workers being evacuated to Cameroon after rebels attacked NDjamena, the Chadian capital Photograph by fan Grarup. The country was plagued by lawless- ness, ethnic strife, widespread corrup- tion, and political instability. In the years since Idriss Déby had seized power, he had engineered fraudulent elections, enriched himself, and dispensed favors to his inner circle. The extraction of oil in southern Chad held the promise of alleviating the coun- trjs extreme poverty. To bring the oil to market, Déby entered into an agreement, in 2000, with the World Bank and several oil companies to finance a pipeline to the Adantic terminals in Cameroon. In ex- change, Débyagreed to use most of the oil revenues to build schools, hospitals, and roads. The oil brought more than a billion õ dollars a year to Déby's regime. He spent much of it on the military, fending off ,- 'z I Aift i , 1 I / " ':.... . \. 1 , "\' 0 - ::. -...---01.. , 'l ... : .. t .", ",.'.. , } . . - Darfur and with money. The possibility of a successfill coup d'état by one or an- other of the rebel groups raises the spec- tre of a regime even worse than Déby's. As a Western diplomat in Chad told me, "This government is one-man deep. Ifhe goes, the country falls into absolute h " c aos. From N'Djamena, Sturm and his team flew four hundred miles across Chad to Abéché, a hundred miles from the Darfur border. The French military maintains an outpost there and had just finished paving a runway to accommo- date a pair of Mirage jets. Sturm's team moved into a house and an adjoining building, which they used as a temporary headquarters. He hired a Land Cruiser and, early one morning, departed on a Under the midday sun, the temperature could soar to a hundred and ten degrees. Dry winds and sand storms parched the terrain and sucked moisture from any- thing animate. Women and children dug deep into the sand of the dry riverbeds to find water and foraged miles into the countryside collecting wood to sell at the markets. As Sturm and his team contin- ued along the border, the hundreds be- came thousands. About seventy-five per cent were women and children, hollow- eyed and lank-skinned from hunger and despair and fatigue. Interviews conducted later by Human Rights Watch and Doc- tors Without Borders told of families being burned alive in their homes, and of men who had been forced to watch, in the moments before their own deaths, as THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 5, 2009 51